verse of the Song of Songs and pictures the
Heavenly City in the words of the Apocalypse. But so completely has the
Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural
expression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words
have become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices of heaven
till all sense of possible unreality has died away. He tells his tale
with such a perfect naturalness that allegories become living things,
that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle are as real to us as
places we see every day, that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. Worldly
Wiseman as if we had met them in the street. It is in this amazing
reality of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative genius specially
displays itself. But this is far from being his only excellence. In its
range, in its directness, in its simple grace, in the ease with which it
changes from lively dialogue to dramatic action, from simple pathos to
passionate earnestness, in the subtle and delicate fancy which often
suffuses its childlike words, in its playful humour, its bold
character-painting, in the even and balanced power which passes without
effort from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the land "where the
Shining Ones commonly walked because it was on the borders of heaven,"
in its sunny kindliness unbroken by one bitter word, the "Pilgrim's
Progress" is among the noblest of English poems. For if Puritanism had
first discovered the poetry which contact with the spiritual world
awakes in the meanest souls, Bunyan was the first of the Puritans who
revealed this poetry to the outer world. The journey of Christian from
the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City is simply a record of the
life of such a Puritan as Bunyan himself, seen through an imaginative
haze of spiritual idealism in which its commonest incidents are
heightened and glorified. He is himself the pilgrim who flies from the
City of Destruction, who climbs the hill Difficulty, who faces Apollyon,
who sees his loved ones cross the river of Death towards the Heavenly
City, and how, because "the Hill on which the City was framed was higher
than the clouds, they therefore went up through the region of the air,
sweetly talking as they went."

[Sidenote: The attack on Holland.]

Great, however, as was the relief of the Indulgence to men like Bunyan,
it was difficult to wring from the bulk of the Nonconformists any
expression of gratitude or satisfaction. Dear as